Posts Tagged ‘masatoshi nei’

As an undergrad student I spent countless hours at the University’s library. The “evolution” section was small, yet it contained the most important volumes, so I used to pick a random book every now and then and read it. That’s how I stumbled upon Nei’s book ‘Molecular Evolutionary Genetics’, and as I read its last chapter my life changed for good: I wanted to be an evolutionary geneticist! I have devoured ever since any book or paper by Nei. In 2008 I was doing a post-doc with Sudhir Kumar (a former Nei’s student). I remember once that Sudhir and I were talking about hypermutability and selection, and then Sudhir told me: “Nei is preparing a new book on mutation”. Since that day I’ve been patiently waiting until the book was ready. Now, five years after that conversation, the book is published. It was worth the wait.

Masatoshi Nei’s book have a special place in my library

Nei’s ideas on mutationism were already sketched in his population genetics book published in 1975, and they were fully presented in a book chapter in 1983 and in his 1987 book I mentioned at the beginning of this post. He builds on the neutral theory, arguing that mutation and drift are more important than selection in molecular evolution. In this sense he continues Motoo Kimura‘s tradition. But Nei emphasizes the role of mutation over all, following the lead of Thomas Morgan and Hermann Muller. Indeed, the contribution of Morgan to evolutionary biology has only been recently acknowledge (as far as I know) by Nei, whilst other evolutionists (probably influenced by the biased account by Ernst Mayr) have completely ignored it.

‘Mutation-Driven Evolution’ is written as an historical account on how our knowledge about evolution has changed in the last 100 years. The first three chapters review the development of early evolutionary theories, with a strong focus on population genetic models (one of Nei’s fields of expertise). Chapters 4 and 5 account for the advent of molecular data and how it demonstrated that evolution is mutation-dependent. In chapters 6 and 7, Nei links the evolution of genomes with the evolution of phenotypic characters and speciation, a frequently missed aspect in many molecular evolution texts. Chapters 8 and 9 cover the role of mutation in adaptation and evolution. A last chapter summarizes the whole book and can be read as a stand-alone piece of text.

The book touches every aspect of evolutionary biology, and Nei gives his view on the cis/trans gene regulation debate, evolution of sex, the emergence of eusociality, Ohno‘s duplication model and Ohta’s nearly neutral theory, among other topics. He clearly states that mutation often produces adaptation, and much of the adaptation we believed to be the product of natural selection is not adaptation at all. In his words: “(adaptation) represents a human perception of the living status of the organism”.

If I have to say something negative about the book, I could only mention that Nei’s style is… well, Nei’s style. Somewhat opinionated and very critic with his opponents. Sometimes one gets the feeling that he is using modern arguments/evidences to attack postulates made by others some decades ago. Some may think this is unfair. Others (as I do) will understand that a point has to be made clear, sound and bold, and Nei has no problem in doing so.

The best way to describe what you’ll find in this book is to reproduce here the last couple of sentences:

“[…] mutation is the ultimate source of all biological innovations and the enormous amount of biodiversity in this world. In this view of evolution there is no need of considering teleological elements.”